Last August, Kevin Rudd called for an end to hostilities in the History Wars. Yet, as with many other Rudd proclamations, this one is unlikely to come to anything. Already in 2010 we have seen Keith Windschuttle and Robert Manne resume their longstanding battle over the ''Stolen Generations'', and the government's own history curriculum has been assessed by many through the History Wars prism, despite Julia Gillard's assertion that its interpretations were neither ''Black Armband'' nor ''White Blindfold''.
So, if the History Wars are to continue, it seems opportune to highlight one often overlooked fact. While in recent decades the Left have clung to a ''Black Armband'' interpretation of Australian history, until the 1960s, most of them supported what is normally called the ''Three Cheers'' (or to use Gillard's term ''White Blindfold'') view.
The terms ''Black Armband'' and ''Three Cheers'' to describe those who see mainly negatives, or mainly positives, in the nation's past, were coined by the perennially adroit wordsmith Geoffrey Blainey. In his seminal 1993 Latham Lecture, Blainey explained how ''to some extent'' his generation had been brought up on a ''Three Cheers'' view, which maintained that ''nearly everything that came after [the convict era] was believed to be pretty good''. He acknowledged that this position may have been ''too favourable, too self-congratulatory'', but he argued that the swing to the opposite ''Black Armband'' extreme had resulted in a take on the nation's history that was ''even more unreal and decidedly jaundiced''.
When Blainey was young, ''the Left wing and the Right wing were alike in their congratulations, though they rarely congratulated the same events''. However, while in the ''school lessons or papers or radio'' that Blainey absorbed in his youth, the Left and Right may have been equally represented, there is no doubt that the Left had the numbers when it came to writing the more intellectual versions of Australian history, or teaching it in the universities.
Writing in the Introduction to Australian Civilization in 1962, The Spectator Australia's own Peter Coleman described ''the standard radical-Leftist interpretation of Australian history which is given in nearly all the textbooks''. Coleman cited works by V.G. Childe, H.V. Evatt and Brian Fitzpatrick, and even the Cambridge History of the British Empire. This standard Left position tried to cement ''the unfolding of Social Progress and the increasing initiative of the working class'' as the overriding themes of Australian history.
However, according to Coleman, some relief was at hand. A postwar Counter-Revolution was underway. It was led by a historian who ''by his questioning of orthodox assumptions ... did more than anyone else to release historians from the prison of the radical interpretation and to begin the systematic study of the neglected themes in our history, especially of religion''. The historian in question was Manning Clark.
Clark was still seen as the leader of the new more pessimistic history when, in 1977, Michael Roe dubbed the standard Leftist optimistic brand as a ''Whig interpretation of Australian history''. Identifying many of the same characteristics as Coleman had in traditional Left-leaning historians, Roe ran through some of the elements which made Australian history a ''success story'' for them.
He highlighted the fact that ''Australians had outpaced Britons in gaining many of the radical boons defined most emphatically by the Chartists''. Other aspects of the nation's past which appealed to this school of historians included the Eureka Stockade and the spread of pastoralism. Most of all, ''the burgeoning of the Labor parties, roughly 1890-1914, ... appears as crucial -- capping the best of what had gone before, and determining much of the future''.
Roe also pointed out that ''Australian Whiggery has had a strong Marxist tincture'', evidenced by historians such as Fitzpatrick, Russel Ward and R.A. Gollan, all of whom ''were confident that Australia was peculiarly the product and property of the working man''. This was a working man who read the Bulletin, loved the poems of Henry Lawson, idealised mateship, voted Labor and to whom no policy mattered more than White Australia.
Historian John Thompson has identified what has happened to this version of history in more recent decades.
The radical national or Old Left tradition of Australian history has long since fallen from favour. Indeed, its conspicuous masculinist values and its perceived limitations, evasions or omissions concerning subjects such as race and cultural diversity have been powerfully challenged and progressively revised from the time of the first assault in the late 1960s to the present.
One of the first steps towards the exit door for the ''Three Cheers'' Old Left school came in 1968 when New Left historian Humphrey McQueen launched an attack on Ward and his most famous work, The Australian Legend. In a 1979 study of Australian historiography, Rob Pascoe draws attention to the fact that many of McQueen's criticisms of the Old Left were similar to those made by Coleman in 1962.
Of course, Coleman and McQueen had very different versions of history with which they wanted to replace the Old Left model, but the fact that the dominant paradigm both were challenging belonged to the Left has been largely forgotten in many of today's simplistic debates.
Interestingly, one of Ward's main arguments, in his response to McQueen's critique, was that the latter was not following the normal forms of historical disagreement, and he hoped that ''some sense of group solidarity with one's fellow historians should help us disagree without rancour and to debate without sneering''. Ward, and anyone else who challenged the New Left view once it became dominant, was to be sadly disappointed. The New Left were always willing to fight their battles aggressively.
The replacement of the Old Left historical paradigm by that of the New Left meant that, whereas ordinary Australians were in the past idealised by their historians, they were now regarded with growing suspicion. Instead of Australians being praised for their belief in democracy, progress and material prosperity, such concepts became problematic; a view that only became more entrenched among intellectuals when Australians used their democratic rights to protect their material prosperity by voting Liberal in December 1975. Within a couple of decades, the unthinkable had happened: concepts such as mateship were being used more by John Howard than by the Left.
There is no doubt that Coleman's 1962 analysis was correct: the Old Left historians did have a skewed vision of Australia's past. One should not lament their demise. However, it is vital to remember them and to understand that, prior to what are now called the History Wars between Left and Right, the battle between the ''Three Cheers'' and ''Black Armband'' views of Australian history was a civil war within the Left.
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